Michele Hilmes

Fanny Brice and the “Schnooks” Strategy: Negotiating a Feminine Comic Persona on the Air

No one could claim that the career of here is Kate Smith—in a system that preferred has been overlooked. Frequently in the news its female stars as secondary sidekicks (Mary during her long career—more for her private than Livingstone to , Portland Hoffa to Fred her professional life—she has been the subject Allen), relatively humorless “straight women” to of three biographies, numerous popular articles, their partner’s comic lead (Molly in Fibber McGee and several major motion pictures.1 The fact that and Molly), or as the recurring “dumb dora” of most of these efforts have stirred controversy only mixed-pair comics (most famously, seems to reflect the tempestuous and contradictory ). Within this carefully delimited life of their heroine, whose career from ethnic containment of the disruptive potential of women’s burlesque to legitimate stage to radio spans more humor, Brice stands out. In her early years on than thirty years and three dramatic marriage-and- NBC in the Chase and Sanborn Hour (1933) divorce scenarios. Amidst the drama of Brice’s and on the of the Air (CBS 1936) life, and the colorful anecdotes of her role in Brice’s was a woman’s voice speaking humorous the lives of such showmen as Florenz Ziegfeld and sometimes bawdy lines, directing attention and , her most enduring contribution both to her gender and to her ethnicity, defying to popular entertainment—the comic character bounds of taste and appropriate feminine behavior. Baby Snooks, whom Brice herself always referred As a consequence she often ran afoul of network to as “Schnooks”—has received relatively little censors and posed difficulties to sponsors. attention. Indeed Brice’s radio work generally, The character of Baby Snooks, developed though itself occurring over a twenty-year period, originally for radio in 1933, became the main is treated as a secondary derivative of her stage staple of her act in the Good News and Maxwell work that added little to her development as a House Coffee Time programs on NBC between comic artist and was far from glamorous. The 1937 and 1944 and eventually received top billing spectacle of a forty-five-year-old woman dressed on The Baby Snooks Show (CBS 1944-1951). as a small child, with screwed-up face, whiny This essay will concentrate on the creation and voice, and the famous cry of “Wah—ah—aaaah!” development of the “Schnooks” character as a that ended many routines, has been taken as either strategy for negotiating the restrictive conventions comically trivial or below the dignity of the of radio on women’s laughter. Snooks, both de- satiric and sexual stage comedienne on whom her sexualized and de-ethnicized, permitted Brice to biographers would like to concentrate. make trenchant and hilarious commentary on a But it can be argued that Brice’s impact on variety of social hypocrisies in a manner better American broadcast culture was greater than suited to the hybrid setting of radio and, later, broadcasting’s impact on Brice. She remains one —at once public and private, mindful of of the few women to headline a major nighttime its high culture obligations but catering to the tastes radio show as a single billing—her only rival of the mass public, based on a commercialism

A SCREEN OF ONE’S OWN 11 Heather Osborne-Thompson, editor, Spectator 25:2 (Fall 2005): 11 - 25. FANNY BRICE AND THE “SCHNOOKS” STRATEGY

of the power of feminine comedy, in both its transgressive potential and its careful containment.2

Mrs. Cohen at the Beach: Brice’s early radio career

Besides the usual difficulties of researching radio—the non- existence of recordings from the early and before, the frequently changing schedules, guest appearances that are hard to document, and the fleeting, unrepeatable nature of the performance—one reason that Brice’s radio career has received relatively little attention from her biographers may be that by the time radio beckoned, most of Brice’s innovative stage work had already been accomplished. One biographer explicitly links Brice’s movement into radio with the two events that mark the official “death” of the vaudeville/burlesque circuit, both in 1932: the closing of the Palace theater in New York and the actual death of Florenz Ziegfeld, the legendary showman who had “discovered” Brice and urged her towards the “Jewish” dialect and persona that would make her “Genius for Satire:” Brice as Jewish evangelist Soul Saving famous.3 Certainly by 1932 Brice Sadie (above) and the risque countess Dubinsky (opposite) had reached the pinnacle of her from the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934. theatrical fame. Having appeared in numerous Ziegfeld Follies since addressed to women but under masculine control. 1910 and repeatedly headlining her own act on It also represents an important contribution to the prestigious Orpheum and RKO vaudeville the development of the child-focused domestic circuits, Brice’s popularity had peaked with two situation comedy so central to early television, Broadway vehicles produced by her soon-to-be which would draw on the edgy innocence and ex-husband, Billy Rose: Sweet and Low, which ran inversion of hierarchies invented by Brice for from October 1930 through April 1931, and Crazy Baby Snooks, sustained by a series of talented and Quilt, which toured across the from influential radio writers and directors. Though in May 1931 through April 1932. some ways the character of Snooks may represent Though Brice developed many comic Brice’s stepping back from the more outspoken personae and acts, she is best known (aside and outrageous humor of her early career, for radio from the perennial “My Man”) for songs such as it provided an important articulation and extension “Sadie Salome,” “Second Hand Rose,” “I’m An

12 FALL 2005 MICHELE HILMES Indian” and for routines such as “Mrs. Cohen at vicious caricature, fulfilling the period’s the Beach,” all of which drew from the vaudeville unflattering expectations of immigrant tradition of “Yiddish” dialect and humor. Though behavior and justifying its prejudicial Fanny Borach (Brice’s original name) was of assumptions. As Brice interpreted her, Jewish heritage, she had been born in Brooklyn however, she emerged as a character and no more naturally spoke with the accent that much more innocuous in performance characterized her act than did (a than on paper. Brice’s expressive frequent Follies co-star) possess the artificially delivery replaced harshness with humor dark skin his stage performances mandated. Both and defused the piece’s underlying anti- blackface and dialect offered a kind of distancing Semitism … Largely through the force of the artist from the material, a way of projecting of her own personality, Brice humanized social satire or unacceptable characteristics onto the stereotype and rounded the caricature an “othered” group.4 In Brice’s case, her function into a character.6 in the Ziegfeld Follies may have been to embody, under a “disguise” of ethnicity, the working- This reliance on physical performance and class elements of burlesque that Ziegfeld had so innuendo, often used to convey sexual meaning, carefully excised from his elevated “celebration of was a characteristic of burlesque. Robert C. Allen the American girl.”5 Thus ethnic and blackface points out that many burlesque routines lost their performers took on exaggerated characteristics point on paper: “Because so much of burlesque’s of the “abject” while often playing with the sexual transgressiveness was visual rather very distinctions and liminality that made such a than verbal, courtroom accounts of burlesque performance necessary. This strategy also allowed performances conveyed almost nothing of their real-life members of subordinated social groups an suggestiveness.”7 The humor and meaning entree to the stage which they might otherwise not resided in the “twist” the performers gave it, have had, providing that they played along with whether verbal or literal. the impersonation. Brice was adept at negotiating Impersonating head-injured ballet dancers the double-edged weapon of ethnic humor, at once (“Becky is Back in the Ballet”), Jewish evangelists taking possession of the “othered” characterization (“Soul-Saving Sadie,” a take-off on Aimee Semple while simultaneously disavowing or disarming it, MacPherson), graceless fan dancers, or the hyper- notably through the physical, almost slapstick sexual movie vamp (“I’m Bad”), Brice’s genius quality of her performance. for physical satire both took the edge off her ethnic Barbara W. Grossman notes this defusing and sexual humor and marked out a performance effect in her discussion of Brice’s popular routine, “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach,” in which Brice plays a heavily-accented, somewhat vulgar and earthy mother of four, shepherding her children and husband through a day at the seaside:

Mrs. Cohen could have been an extremely unpleasant creation. Portrayed by anyone else, she would have been a

A SCREEN OF ONE’S OWN 13 FANNY BRICE AND THE “SCHNOOKS” STRATEGY space unique to Brice—and one unheard of for a Sanborn Coffee Hour variety program, sponsored female . Often earthy and sometimes by Standard Brands, from April 12 to September slightly bawdy, full of double entendres and subtle 27, 1933, Sunday nights at eight o’clock on NBC references, Brice’s combination of ethnic humor Red. and physical satire earned her the highest acclaim Though sponsor, agency and star were now from stage critics and audiences alike. Radio happy, Brice very quickly ran afoul of NBC’s would be another matter, and another less risky fledgling Continuity Acceptance policies. By May device for permitting Brice’s comic persona to 24, trouble over “gag lines in Jewish” resulted in survive on the air would soon become necessary. a memo from the production supervisor to John Brice first ventured onto the air on the Philco Royal, head of programming at NBC, complaining Hour in February 1930, having signed a contract that an extra line had been slipped in, unapproved. for three shows, possibly to be continued they By May 29, an entire page of deletions fills a proved successful. According to a report in the memo from Bertha Brainard, head of commercial New York Times, the first show featured a “dialect programming. NBC objected to humor it radio version of Romeo and Juliet” along with perceived as containing unwanted or tasteless several of Brice’s well-known songs.8 On her innuendo, in ways that aren’t always immediately next appearance, Brice performed another dialect perceptible to today’s reading: skit, this time “Samson and Delilah.” According to Grossman, “The negative response to her ‘Trickled’ means to run slowly ... performance led Philco not only to drop the idea ‘anecdote’ means a short tale ... The dog of using her in a series, but even to cancel the third trickled down street with a can tied to his broadcast it had already announced.” Brice sued anecdote. Erwin-Wasey, the producing agency, for breach of contract, winning $1,000 in a settlement.9 I wrote a play about fallen arches, flat feet After this disappointment Brice returned to and the seven-year-itch ... the producer the stage, and did not attempt radio again until told me to put everything I had into it. 1933. But once more the ride was bumpy. Variety reports that Brice was considered and rejected by But even seemingly innocuous lines could be two major clients, Chesterfield and Chevrolet, due troublesome. According to Brainard, to the interference of her producer husband, Billy Rose, in auditions. Though the article should We questioned Fanny Brice’s reading of be read in the context of ad agency hype and “Little Jack Horner” with verbal gestures competition in program production, it goes on to which if read in a certain way might be report that J. Walter Thompson took the situation very bad taste.11 in hand by banishing Rose from Brice’s third try, this time on the well-established Fleischmann And by June 14 the problem had, if anything, Yeast Hour. The “click results” (Variet-ese for worsened. Brainard reported that deletions favorable reception) obtained on this performance included the following gags: induced the agency to introduce Brice on the Royal Vagabonds program in March 1933, sponsored by MAN Standard Brands for Royal Gelatin. It featured I don’t speak such good English songs and comedy routines from Brice’s stage so I have to feel for my act, accompanied by George Olsen’s orchestra, words. every Wednesday evening from 8:00 to 8:30 on FANNY the NBC Red network.10 Though initial reviews Well, they ain’t tattooed on were lukewarm—Variety blamed “the ineptitude me. of the adapting of the comedienne’s talents for the ether”—her act improved enough that the agency and made the decision to feature her on the Chase and

14 FALL 2005 MICHELE HILMES BRICE The line to which Mr. Kirchhofer refers may well Did he say you got appendisidess have been Fanny asking her son, “Well, why didn’t or appendeseatis? It’s a big you do it while you were in the water?”16 Conflicts difference. If the pain is in the side it is appendesidess. over the acceptability of lines such as these added to the strain between networks and their And, once again, mere words could not contain the obstreperous producers—advertising agencies and threat that Brice’s comic delivery offered: sponsors—whose desire to build on established show-business success often violated networks’ Brice: (answering telephone) Hello Mrs. more sensitive public service obligations.17 Greenberg—this is Mrs. Cohen—oy am Audiences approved, however, despite the I sick. I was in bed all day with three behind-the-scenes struggles, and the Chase and doctors and two nurses ... (We suggested Sanborn Hour was rated among the top twenty- this cut because of the possible double five programs on the air in Variety’s spring poll.18 meaning Miss Brice might have given And Baby Snooks made her first appearance on it.)12 this show, though her precedents in other Brice characters, such as “Babykins” in Corned Beef and Not only jokes that emphasized the sexual and Roses, clearly contributed. According to Barbara physical could cause problems. A proposed Grossman, “The terrible toddler emerged on “burlesque on Mickey and Minnie Mouse” was radio and was the first character Brice developed shot down before the July 5 show out of apparently specifically for that medium.”19 well-placed fear of Disney disapproval.13 And it is However, in October 1933 Brice’s contract hard to discern the most offensive part of the lines with Standard Brands expired to allow her to cut from the May 31 program: go back on stage, and although she made guest appearances on several shows, she would not (Reading headlines) Hitler coming to return to the air steadily until 1936. In the America ...Ten thousand Hebrews leave meantime, she would experience one of her for Palestine ...Woman of 80 has twins greatest theatrical successes, the Ziegfeld Follies ... Sharkey blames Schmeling ... Mr. of 1934, which was produced by Ziegfeld’s widow and Mrs. Clark announce the arrival of and comedienne and later radio star in her own a daughter, their sixteenth child ... to be right, . This show formally introduced continued.14 the character of Baby Snooks on stage, in a skit written by David Freedman and performed with A letter from an affiliate, WBEN Buffalo, written Eve Arden as Mother and Victor Morley as Daddy, in 1939 sums up the feeling about Brice’s pre- which allowed Snooks to misinterpret the story Snooks material on the air: of George as justification for lying. Herbert Goldman assesses this development: Two or three years ago we learned by experience that we had to be alert The Snooks sketch marked the first time whenever Fanny Brice was scheduled Fanny’s baby exhibited the precocious as a guest performer on any network quality that marked Snooks’ later career program. She had given one of her pet and gave the character its bite and truth. skits several times, in which her small Snooks saw the fallibility and hypocrisy boy was on the beach. There is in it a of adults—but, as a baby, lacked fear and very unmistakable connotation of coarse the compassion needed to respect them.20 and vulgar conduct ... I hope I will not be misunderstood when I urge the point that Or, as Brice herself explained: some of the broader types of vaudeville jokes certainly have no place on a radio I told my writers I wanted to do a baby. program going into the home ...15 And they didn’t know what I was talking

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about, what kind of a baby I wanted to radio production for years23). Although MGM do, and looked at me as though to say, would ultimately withdraw its support, it was a ‘The old girl wants to be cute.’ And they fittingly glamorous and high-profile setting in always brushed it aside. which Brice might shine. Airing on Thursday There was another reason why I evenings from nine to ten o’clock on the NBC thought the baby was good. You know Red network, Benton and Bowles produced this the way they have to go over your script high-budget for General Foods, one for censorship? I found out when I was of radio’s most prolific sponsors, and makers of doing Mrs. Cohen at the Beach. We’d be Maxwell House Coffee. MGM was paid $25,000 ready to rehearse, and they’d say: ‘You per week to contribute its stars and name, and can’t do this, you can’t do that. This will although some purported to find the arrangement offend, and that will not sound nice.’ And confusing—Newsweek worried in 1937 that I knew this couldn’t happen with a baby. radio audiences “couldn’t decide whether Metro- Because what can you write about a child Goldwyn-Mayer was trying to sell Maxwell that has to be censored?21 House, or if the coffeemakers were putting out Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in airtight containers”24— Further development of Snooks would occur for it soon possessed a respectable Hooperrating (an the , which opened in early version of the Nielsens) of 20.2. The hour- January of that year. long program featured Robert Young as host for In the meantime Brice branched out with her most of its run. A changing roster of MGM stars first Snooks-based radio show, theZiegfeld Follies and creative personnel appeared to publicize their of the Air, sponsored by the Colgate-Palmolive latest and perform short skits and musical Company. From February 22 until June 6, 1936, acts, but each program featured at least one skit by this show ran on CBS Saturday nights from eight Brice as Snooks, with as Daddy, to nine o’clock, though Brice appeared on only ten as well as a skit by comedian . of the shows.22 Her co-stars were comics James Meredith Wilson’s orchestra provided musical Melton and Benny Fields, along with Patti Chapin. accompaniment. Brice’s participation was cut short when her Good News’s broadcast of December 30, stage show ended in May. After a much-needed 1937 represents a typical early program.25 Hosted rest, the show reopened as The New Ziegfeld by Jimmy Stewart, the program opens with a Follies of 1936-1937 and toured the country from monologue and introduction by that MGM star, September to May 1937 until it closed in Hershey, followed by a Baby Snooks skit, this one centering . Aside from a brief return in 1940, on the tale of Daniel in the lion’s den. A song this would be Brice’s last theatrical effort. Now, performed by Freda Starr, an MGM ingenue, her attention turned more fully to radio and, follows, accompanied by Wilson’s orchestra, consequently, to Baby Snooks almost exclusively. giving way to a specially-written short vignette Brice was forty-six, Snooks five. acted by Jimmy Stewart and Myrna Loy. Another skit with Wallace Beery precedes the introduction The “Schnooks” Strategy of Cedric Gibbons, MGM’s art director, who discourses rather stiltedly with Stewart about his Brice—or at least her character, Baby Snooks— craft. Brice then returns, this time in a sketch became a household name nationally on the entitled “Mr. and Mrs. Garfinkle,” about an MGM/Maxwell House Coffee Good News of 1938 immigrant Jewish couple who lose money betting program, which produced continuous Good News on a horse race, in dialect. Lionel Barrymore for the delectation of the American public until rounds out the evening in a dramatic piece that 1940. This much-trumpeted and star-studded closes the show. Early shows tended to emphasize production marked the first open foray of a major the MGM connection in this way: on the April studio into sponsorship of a radio program 14, 1938 program, sings a duet (though studios had been involved in aspects of with Snooks (her famous, “Why? Because” song)

16 FALL 2005 MICHELE HILMES and Adrian, MGM’s premiere costume designer, had jettisoned Irma and returned in The Baby imparts some glamour to the event, along with, Snooks Show on CBS for Sanka Coffee, produced rather inexplicably, Bernarr Macfadden, who by Young and Rubicam. Sponsorship shifted to was the publisher of True Romance and True General Foods in September 1947, promoting Jell- Confessions magazines, the infamous tabloid O, until May 1948. Brice then went off the air New York Graphic, and producer of several radio for a year and a half, a hiatus attributed by some shows patterned after his print holdings.26 For the to “playing hard to get,” but returned to NBC in momentous event of Lionel Barrymore’s sixty- November 1949 with a “revival” of her classic first birthday on April 27, 1939, Louis B. Mayer Snooks program, aired Tuesday nights at 8:30 and himself appears to host a tribute that includes produced by Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample for the such MGM luminaries as Norma Shearer, Robert Lewis-Howe company, makers of Tums.29 Here Taylor, Mickey Rooney and Joan Crawford.27 But she remained until her untimely death in May of throughout all this grandstanding, Baby Snooks, 1951. with Hanley Stafford as her constantly exasperated “Schnooks,” as developed by Brice over the daddy, continued to tie together the performance years, offered listeners a good-natured critique with at least one humorous routine per evening. of adult hypocrisies, exploration of the pitfalls This format continued until March 1940, at of the English language, and an inverted world which time it changed to a half-hour program from seen through the eyes of a precociously resistant 9 to 9:30 p.m. on Thursdays. Then, following and troublesome child, whose deflation of some MGM’s withdrawal from the show, its title changed of the most respected traditions, concepts, to Maxwell House Coffee Time, running from 8 to and institutions of American culture provoked 8:30 p.m. on NBC, still under the sponsorship sympathetic laughter while remaining safely of General Foods and production of Benton and contained and corrected by her age and innocence. Bowles. Now Brice and Morgan split the half Hanley Stafford, though providing one of the main hour between them, without any of the MGM butts of Snooks’s sly parodies, also represents a guests and promotional hoopla of the earlier series. father devoted to his daughter, heavily involved Brice’s Baby Snooks routine, which had varied in in her upbringing (until the late 1940s, Snooks’s length and placement during the Good News years, mother remained a rarely present figure), and quick developed a consistency of format which drew on to come to Snooks’s defense if she is criticized by the established “situation comedy” of shows such others. In a 1939 skit, Daddy, upset by Snooks’s as , Fibber McGee and Molly, and terrible grades in school, decides to hire a tutor.30 The Aldrich Family, this time with a child as the In the opening lines, Snooks parodies a common central focus in a somewhat dysfunctional, but still attribution of schooling for women: fairly wholesome, American family—a situation that would come to dominate early television. DADDY The half-hour Maxwell House Coffee Time I’m hiring a private teacher to ran for four seasons. Then, in September 1944, make you work. Brice moved to CBS in Toasties Time, sponsored SNOOKS by General Foods, and attempted to introduce Waaahhh! … I don’t want no a new character, Irma Potts, described as “a private teacher. trustful shopgirl with a protruding lower lip and DADDY a slight lisp” or elsewhere as “a forlorn and rather Oh now listen, dear, it’s for frustrated old maid.”28 The scene shifted to a your own good. She’ll make you a little lady. small town, with , in his first radio SNOOKS role, playing the postman and Hanley Stafford I don’t wanna be a lady ... and as the town druggist. Baby Snooks was still a I don’t wanna go to school. character, but the main emphasis shifted to Irma. DADDY This new persona proved unsuccessful and lasted (voice rising) only for one season; by September 1945 Brice Well, what do you want to do!

A SCREEN OF ONE’S OWN 17 FANNY BRICE AND THE “SCHNOOKS” STRATEGY

SNOOKS What for? I ain’t done nothin’. DADDY Now kiss your teacher, Snooksie. SNOOKS You kiss her, Daddy ... TEACHER Come here. SNOOKS Leave me alone. TEACHER (threateningly) When I beckon like this, it means I want you to come. SNOOKS When I stick out my tongue like this, it means I ain’t comin’!

Finally the teacher, at the end of her patience, turns Snooks over her knee and spanks her.

TEACHER There! That’ll impress it on your mind. SNOOKS That ain’t where my mind is!

This last line is a reworking of one that Brice attempted to use in 1933 on the Chase and Sanborn show:

FANNY Abe, why do you spank the boy like that? ABE I spanked him to impress it on Brice as the precocious Baby Snooks on his mind. NBC Radio. FANNY Where do you think his mind is?31 SNOOKS (smugly) That time, network continuity acceptance editors I want to get married. objected and deleted it immediately. Now, from the mouth of a child, it could be uttered over the air When the teacher arrives, speaking with a without repercussions. The “Schnooks” strategy pretentious upper-class accent, Snooks refuses to was working. be intimidated or to cooperate. In another skit, Snooks is hindering her father TEACHER from getting dressed and going off to perform Now come here and kiss me, jury duty, for which he has been called. This little one. skit allows Brice to parody gently one of the

18 FALL 2005 MICHELE HILMES authoritative institutions of society, as Daddy tries SNOOKS to explain what jury duty is. (slyly) I...I..I know … SNOOKS Where you goin’, Daddy? The next exchange in this skit interjects a note that, DADDY once again, it is hard to imagine being allowed in I told you, I have to go to court. an exchange between anything other than a child SNOOKS and adult: Why? DADDY DADDY I’ve been called for jury duty. ...Then the court is called to I’ve got to appear in a suit. order, and the lawyers come in SNOOKS with their briefs. What kind of suit? SNOOKS DADDY Is that all they wear? I don’t know, they didn’t tell DADDY me. It could be any kind of a They don’t wear their briefs, suit. they hand them to the judge. SNOOKS SNOOKS You wanna wear my Mickey Mouse Ain’t he got any of his own? suit? ... DADDY DADDY Why no, the only briefs he’s ... there’s eleven men on got are those he gets from the juries and with the foreman lawyers ... Snooks, these are makes it twelve. not the kind of briefs that SNOOKS people wear. These briefs are Eleven and four is twelve? just paper. DADDY SNOOKS No! Eleven and four is fifteen. Mommy’s got some ... But the foreman in this case DADDY happens to be just one man. (cutting her off) Sometimes the jury has twelve I don’t care what Mommy’s got! jurymen, and they’re all Now these papers contain the ladies. evidence in the case! That’s SNOOKS how the lawyers present the 32 The four men too? bare facts.

And once again, an opportunity arises for At other times, the English language itself—the Snooks to make a kind of sexual innuendo that very stuff of radio—received interrogation at surely would have been blocked if spoken by a Snooks’s hands. purportedly adult woman: SNOOKS DADDY Daddy, what’s in this barrel? What did I just get done telling DADDY you? Those are mixed nuts. SNOOKS SNOOKS Eleven and four is twelve and I want a mixed nut. all the men is ladies. DADDY DADDY Well, take one. I didn’t say anything of the SNOOKS kind! If they were all ladies Is this a mixed nut, Daddy? on the jury, what would I be DADDY doing there? No, that’s a filbert.

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SNOOKS able to play, week after week, an irreverent, Is this a mixed nut? questioning, unruly and, most importantly, central DADDY female character who continuously thwarts No, that’s a walnut. SNOOKS the intentions of society to contain her, most Well, which is the mixed nuts? particularly the efforts of her father to keep her GROCER under control. Of course, Hanley Stafford’s The whole barrel is full of Daddy figure is an unusual one in the world of mixed nuts. radio, abnormally concerned with the care of his SNOOKS child and thus in many ways taking on feminine Then why can’t I find one? characteristics, which can then be deflated without GROCER much danger to everyday paternal authority. (his voice rising) Another device helps to further contain the danger Because there’s no such thing as a mixed nut. The whole barrel of feminine unruliness: the constant unflattering is full of mixed nuts. But no references to Daddy’s wife, Snooks’s mother, single nut is a mixed nut! who is depicted along the lines of the traditional SNOOKS shrew and dumb dora. When Snooks is failing in Do you feel all right, mister? school, Daddy remarks in an aside, “That’s what I get for marrying such a mental giant.” In the Or, again, as Daddy attempts to dictate to his jury duty sketch, when Snooks claims she knows secretary at home, and can’t persuade Snooks to what Daddy would be doing with the ladies, he go to bed, she questions him about a word in his exclaims, “You’re getting more like your mother letter. every day!” Yet week after week Snooks makes it clear that she is the one with the incisive and clear SNOOKS perception of events, and draws the listener into What’s a shipment? her inverted child’s eye view of adult pretensions. DADDY It’s an order of goods. Sidekicks, Shrews, and Dumb Doras SNOOKS Does it come in a ship? DADDY To place Brice’s contributions to feminine radio No, a shipment doesn’t come in a comedy into perspective, it is useful to consider ship. It comes in a car. both her own precedents and those already SNOOKS established on radio by the time Snooks made her A shipment comes in a car? ... national impact. Brice herself, as we have seen, Well, what comes in a ship? came from the tradition of burlesque comedy DADDY that, although adapted for the now middle-class A cargo ... A shipment comes in a car and a cargo comes in a ship vaudeville audience, still retained some of its ... earlier bawdy and sexual flavor. As late as SNOOKS 1930, in a review of the Fanny Brice/Billy Rose (after a pause) production Corned Beef and Roses, Variety noted Oh.33 that although the show opened strongly the second half “faded fast and had to depend on smut, of Another plot featured Snooks attempting to claim which there was plenty. In fact, it is generally illness to stay home from school. When Daddy agreed in Philly that ‘Corned Beef and Roses’ is belittles her story, she gets him to admit that he is the dirtiest show ever witnessed here.”35 Though planning to call in sick at work so he can play golf. this characterization is a bit hard to believe, it Snooks uses this as blackmail, threatening to call reflects vaudeville’s cleaned-up image and refers his boss.34 back to an earlier more risqué burlesque tradition Throughout the almost fifteen-year that was in the process of being repressed.36 Also development of the Snooks character, Brice is on the bill that night was , whose

20 FALL 2005 MICHELE HILMES previous show-business background had dipped that the comedian finds himself yielding into the bawdier underside of stage entertainment. to the temptation to extract another laugh About his performance the scandalized Variety by a silly bit of tom-foolery.39 reviewer went on, “This wasn’t just off color; it was lower-class, stag-smoker stuff and many Robert Landry gave her a similarly unfavorable a blasé theatregoer was hard put to it to keep review for the debut broadcast of The Ziegfeld from blushing. Even Jessel was intensely Follies of the Air: embarrassed.” It was in this context that Brice introduced the character of “Babykins,” Snooks’s She was a comedienne without comedy. predecessor. Though the reviewer applauded this Her material left her fighting a losing skit, he still characterized it as “dirty” and not battle ... Came up first with a string of able to redeem a show that all in all constituted “a wisecracks that lacked glitter and were black eye both for Broadway and for the theatre in unbecoming to a woman ... Still later did general.” This type of material would clearly not a satire that wasn’t satirical on a female be suitable for radio. Yet Brice’s next efforts on platform demon discussing international stage were criticized for playing too much towards affairs. Finally she sang “I’m an Indian” the new medium. Her 1932 touring show Fanny with most of the lines either brushed up Brice included a song number about “how various for radio or shorn of most of their force persons would handle a popular song on the when divorced from the mimicry that radio,” which was panned as “an attempt on Miss makes this performer stand out behind Brice’s part to sell herself to radio via her stage the footlights.40 showing, and if so, still inexcusable. Miss Brice is too great, and too important an artist to allow this Thus the very things that had made her a star—her sort of thing to happen.”37 roots in burlesque, her earthy ethnic humor, Brice’s efforts to adapt to radio met with the physical parody that transcended the limits just the opposite problem. Her debut for J. of female and ethnic stereotypes on stage and Walter Thompson/Standard Brands on the Royal reached out directly to the audience, her status Vagabonds program showed “every evidence of as a “speaking woman” itself—all of these could being badly adapted, if not totally unsuited, for not be easily adapted to the non-visual, tightly mike purposes. Missing was the Brice skill at controlled, conservative medium of radio. visual burlesque.”38 Additionally, according to Most of the acts featuring female the reviewer, Brice had a tendency to play for the on the air in the early 1930s stemmed from a studio audience—probably with exactly the kind different, less dangerous vaudeville tradition: of physical humor and mugging so successful on the male/female comedy team. Emerging from stage—creating an unsatisfactory and confusing burlesque around the turn of the century, the male/ experience for the listeners at home. Brice herself female team re-introduced the “speaking woman” acknowledged this in an interview: to the stage, after its much-criticized apotheosis in such scandalously sexualized spectacles as Lydia But there is this danger to be considered, Thompson’s “British Blondes” in the late 1860s. especially for an old trouper like myself According to Shirley Louise Staples, early mixed ... The performer must remember that he comedy teams focused on romantic dialogue and is playing for a great unseen audience and situations, often including a song number and not the few hundred people gathered to featuring a happy ending.41 By the teens many of watch the show. The temptation to play these acts had incorporated elements of the ethnic to the visible audience by indulging in comedy routine, based on bickering dialogue and a funny grimace or gesture may annoy comic insults, with couples berating each other the radio listener, who is not in on the in a series of put-downs. In response to this, by joke. The script keeps this tendency for the late teens and early twenties a new type of by-play pretty well in check, but even at humor arose, based on the childlike or “dumb

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control Mary’s flights of fancy—it was extremely unusual on radio to hear a female comedian performing on her own, without the containing framework of the male/female structure. Solo male comedians were legion, but Brice remains one of the few women to receive top billing in her own right. Though Hanley Stafford’s “Daddy” certainly provided a similar function to the male in the duo, his role was always secondary to Snooks and indeed most of the humor devolved from her undermining of his authority. Not until the late 1940s would solo comediennes seize control of their acts, as former film stars such as , , Eve Arden, Ann Sothern, Judy Canova and Marie Wilson debuted in their own comedy programs, many of which carried over into television.42 Fanny Brice had never worked as part of a couple, and her humor and persona stemmed from a burlesque tradition quite different from the male/female comedy endemic to radio. At once more highly sexual, more heavily ethnic, drawing on parody and satire rather than insult Fanny Brice was one of the few radio comediennes and “couple” jokes, her early comedic routines who did not work as part of a “couple.” could not work within radio’s strict containment of female humor and marginalization of the “talking dora” character played by the female member of woman.” Brice’s creation of the Baby Snooks figure the team, with the male as straight man. Early worked perfectly to negotiate the conflicting demands practitioners of this tradition include Ben Ryan of her edgy, somewhat transgressive humor and the and Harriette Lee, whose act cast Lee as a tough medium of radio. The “Schnooks” strategy consisted of Bowery child—thus combining ignorance, an act of camouflage, taking the sensibilities and satire ethnicity and the figure of the child in one—and of a burlesque comedienne and hiding it behind a baby’s Arleen Bronson and Joe Laurie Jr. Taken to the voice and an innocent demeanor. A child could provide comics by strips such as “Tillie the Toiler” and the social skewering of the dumb dora figures while “Blondie” in the 1920s, it provided a familiar and preserving the sexual innuendo, now safely distanced, of comfortable transition to radio in such well-known the burlesque. In this way it continued the strategy that acts as Burns and Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Robert Allen attributes to the latter stages of burlesque, Jane and Goodman Ace in , and the personified through performers such as Sophie Tucker, teams of and Portland Hoffa, and Jack Mae West, and Eva Tanguay: Benny and . The most striking feature of this act is its The final chapter that emerges from this concentration of the zany and satirical humor in history was that of tolerating “unruly” female the figure of the scatterbrained woman, controlled performers so long as their transgressive power and contained by the male half of the team. was channeled and defused through their Though this distribution of social authority could construction as grotesque figures. Such figures be tampered with or even reversed—McGee’s were authorized to be transgressive because, by Irishness made him the humorous foil and Molly their fusing of incongruent cultural categories, the level-headed one; Benny’s “fall guy” could be they had been “disqualified” as objects of erotic at once an object of fun even while he acted to desire.43

22 FALL 2005 MICHELE HILMES Nothing could be more safely disqualified than received no similar listener reaction we do feel a child, and the spectacle of Brice in costume— you have made a very constructive suggestion widely circulated in publicity and films—as a and you should know we intend to bring this to fiftyish woman dressed in short skirt and hair the attention of the writers and producer of the bow, often in an indelicate and awkward position, show.”47 However, their true feelings are summed with her face twisted in a grimace and an infantile up in an interoffice memo: “Why don’t you write voice, surely approached the grotesque. On radio, H. Murphy a letter in East Orange and in your own Brice at first attempted to preserve the adult Fanny gummy fashion win him/her back to our network on the air, with her edgy humor intact, only to with words of appreciation and gratitude. If you meet with network discipline for her behavior feel so inclined you might further instruct him/her “unbecoming to a woman.” Unbecoming to a to go stick his/her head in a toilet seat.48 woman, maybe, but not to a child. Released from Most likely of more concern was the show’s the bonds of middle-class respectability enforced scheduling against that phenomenon of early by the squeamish public service anxieties of television, the starring Milton the radio networks, outside the confines of the Berle, on NBC-TV. Whether any time-honored containment of the male/female team, it took a radio comedian could have held out against that baby to get away with adult female humor. competition had not been conclusively proven at However, this persona could backfire. By the time of Fanny Brice’s sudden death from a 1949, the child had been configured in a new cerebral hemorrhage on May 24, 1951.49 way in American society: the center of domestic The obituaries remembered her both as star life, inscribed in an increasingly enforced web of of stage and screen and as the creator of Baby family hierarchies and the discourse of juvenile Snooks. Having not quite made it to television— delinquency. Snooks hardly embodied the model and it is doubtful whether the fifty-nine-year-old child of the 1950s. Even Variety fretted, “Her actress could have carried Snooks to TV without unruliness poses a script problem, in that her wrong- the grotesque overwhelming the humorous—Brice doing can’t be condoned.”44 A whole new type of faded slowly from memory, her contributions listener controversy arose. As one letter put it: to the development of broadcast program forms recalled in brief asides but never deeply assessed. We are trying to prevent children from However, her child-centered brand of situation being delinquents and the Baby Snooks comedy would soon become a staple of television. program has a father telling a child that Programs such as Leave It To Beaver, My Three she must open a mail box to recover a Sons, Dennis the Menace and The Patty Duke letter and has him admit to the child that it Show drew on the mischievous, troublemaking is a criminal offense. He thinks nothing of ways of the relatively innocent child to question having her tell lies for him! If it is smart adult authority and social norms, though never with for Baby Snooks to lie and do those things the transgressive edge of Snooks.50 And Snooks is it is smart for little listeners to follow suit. the character with whom Brice spent more of her Can’t we have more wholesome humor? life and expended more of her comic energy, than You may be sure WNBC will not be tuned any of her justly famous stage routines, despite in on my radio at that time again.45 what later semi-biographical works, like ’s two films, choose to remember. She In January 1950 another listener was moved to deserves a more prominent place in the history send a telegram: “THIS EVENINGS BABY of American media culture than past accounts SNOOKS PROGRAM MARKS A NEW LOW have permitted. The “Schnooks” strategy marks IN BAD TASTE AND UNSUITABILITY FOR a significant moment in the movement of women’s JUVENILE LISTENERS.”46 humor from the private sphere to the public arena. At NBC, Continuity Acceptance professed Once heard, Baby Snooks speaks in a voice it is concern to the first writer: “While we have hard to forget.

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Michele Hilmes is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author or editor of several books on broadcasting history, including Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 (Minnesota, 1997); Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (Wadsworth Publishing, 2001); The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (Routledge, 2001, ed. with Jason Loviglio), and The Television History Book (British Film Institute, 2003). She is currently at work on NBC: America’s Network, a collection of essays tracing the history of the National Broadcasting Company and its impact on American culture.

Notes

1 The biographies are: Herbert G. Goldman, Fanny Brice: The Original (NY: Oxford, 1992); Barbara W. Grossman, Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Norman Katkov, The Fabulous Fanny (NY: Knopf, 1953). The films include My Man (Warner Bros., 1928); Be Yourself! (United Artists, 1930); (MGM, 1936); Everybody Sing (MGM, 1938); and Ziegfeld Follies (MGM, 1946); in addition to smaller roles in Night Club (Paramount, 1929) and Crime Without Passion (Paramount, 1934). Besides these films in which she appeared, Brice has been the subject of The Rose of Washington Square (20th-Fox, 1938), an unauthorized version of Brice’s life for which she sued and received damages from the studio, and the Barbra Streisand vehicles Funny Girl in 1968 (first a Broadway musical in 1964) and in 1975. 2 I am indebted to Kathleen Rowe’s excellent analysis of the “unruly woman” on television and in film, though she does not specifically mention Brice. Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 3 Grossman, Funny Woman, 194. 4 For a discussion of blackface, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991) and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). For the appropriation of blackface and ethnic humor in radio see Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: Broadcasting and American Culture 1922 to 1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 5 See Robert C. Allen, A Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 243-49. 6 Grossman, Funny Woman, 172. 7 Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 251. 8 New York Times, “The Microphone Will Present,” February 2, 1930. 9 Grossman, Funny Woman, 185-86; 263, note 81. Grossman is the first chronicler of Brice to take note of these Philco performances. 10 J. Walter Thompson, “Chase & Sanborn’s Tender Leaf Tea—History of Radio Advertising—Year 1933,” Box 19 Standard Brands—Chase and Sanborn Hour 1929-43, J. Walter Thompson Collection, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University Library, Durham, NC. 11 Memo from Bertha Brainard to G. F. McClelland, “Program Deletions,” May 29, 1933, Box 16, Folder 36, National Broadcasting Company Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI (hereafter referred to as NBC). 12 Memo from Bertha Brainard to G. F. McClelland, “Program Deletions,” June 14, 1933, Box 16, Folder 36, NBC. 13 Memo from Bertha Brainard to John F. Royal, “Chase and Sanborn’s Tea,” July 5, 1933, Box 16, Folder 36, NBC. 14 Brainard, “Program Deletions,” May 29, 1933. 15 Letter from A.H. Kirchhofer to Lenox R. Lohr, June 14, 1939, Box 68, Folder 52, NBC. 16 This is from the “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach” skit, first introduced by Brice in 1927 and later featured in the 1928 film My Man. One biographer, Herbert G. Goldman, points out that Gertrude Berg developed her highly successful radio show The Rise of the Goldbergs soon after this skit came out on film, and that at least one line—the famous “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Bloo—oom”—came directly out of Brice’s routine. 17 For an extended discussion of this tension and its effects on network policy and programming, see Hilmes, Radio Voices. 18 Variety, “Radio Savants up in Polls,” May 6 1933. 19 Grossman, Funny Woman, 197. 20 Goldman, Fanny Brice, 157. 21 Katkov, Fabulous Fanny, 245-46. 22 Goldman, Fanny Brice, 277.

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23 See Michele Hilmes, and Broadcasting: Radio to Cable (University of Illinois Press, 1990) for a full history of this relationship. 24 Newsweek, November 15, 1937, 25. 25 Good News of 1937, NBC, December 30, 1937, Recording #445, Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety, and Comedy’s Hollywood Archives Collection, Van Nuys, CA (hereafter referred to as SPERDVAC Hollywood Archives). 26 Good News of 1938, NBC, April 14, 1938, Recording #451, SPERDVAC Hollywood Archives. 27 Good News of 1939, NBC, April 27, 1939, Recording #487, SPERDVAC Hollywood Archives. 28 Variety, “Fanny Brice Show,” September 20 1944; Newsweek, “100% Irma,” October 2, 1944, 56. 29 Variety, “Baby Snooks,” October 10, 1945; “Fanny Brice Show,” November 16, 1949; “Fanny Brice Show,” October 18, 1950. 30 Good News of 1939, NBC, April 6, 1939, Recording #484, SPERDVAC Hollywood Archives. 31 Memo from Bertha Brainard to George F. McClellan, “Program Deletions,” June 6, 1933, Box 16, Folder 60, NBC. 32 Good News of 1939, April 6, 1939. 33 Good News of 1940, January 11, 1940, Recording #312, SPERDVAC Hollywood Archives. 34 The Baby Snooks Show, 1944, #0557, University of Memphis Archives, Memphis, TN. 35 Variety, “Out of Town Reviews: Corned Beef and Roses,” October 22, 1930. 36 Or, as Robert C. Allen points out, a process of bifurcation was going on. As mainstream burlesque was being elevated to middle- class status in such highly respected Broadway shows as the Ziegfeld Follies, in other venues the strip-tease became central to the definition of burlesque in the 1930s. While always socially suspect, the strip show became more widely popular in the Depression, to the point of semi-respectability, as in the fabled New York burlesque club Minsky’s. 37 Variety “Paramount, N.Y.” December 6, 1932. 38 Variety, “Royal Vagabonds,” March 12, 1933. 39 New York Times, “Mingling Laughs and Tears,” May 21, 1933. 40 Robert Landry, Variety, “Fanny Brice,” March 4, 1936. 41 Shirley Louise Staples, “From ‘Barney’s Courtship’ to Burns and Allen: Male-Female Comedy Teams in American Vaudeville, 1865-1932,” Ph. D. dissertation, Tufts University, 1981. 42 Joan Davis starred in Leave It To Joan, on NBC, then CBS, from 1944 to 1949, then moved to television in I Married Joan, NBC 1952-55; Eve Arden played Mother to Baby Snooks until 1948, when she became Our Miss Brooks on CBS until 1956, the last four years simulcast on television as well; Lucille Ball appeared in My Favorite Husband on CBS beginning in 1948, then moved to TV in 1951; Marie Wilson was My Friend Irma on CBS from 1947 until 1955, the last two years simulcast; Ann Sothern starred as Maisie, CBS 1945-1952, moving to television in Private Secretary from 1953 until 1957; Judy Canova had her own comedy/variety show on CBS from 1943 until 1954. Her career faded after TV’s arrival, but she appeared as a guest star on what may be the only all-female prime time comedy variety show in the history of television, the Ina Ray Hutton Show, on NBC from July to September in 1956. 43 Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 282. 44 Variety, “Fanny Brice Show,” October 18, 1950. 45 Letter from H. Murphy to NBC, n.d. (c. Nov. 1949), Box 151, Folder 5, NBC. 46 Telegram from Mrs. G. W. Morgan to NBC, Jan. 10, 1950, Box 151, Folder 5, NBC. 47 Letter from Carl Watson to Mrs. H. Murphy, November 25, 1949, Box 151, Folder 5, NBC. 48 Memo from Don Honrath to Stockton Helffrich, November 21, 1949, Box 151, Folder 5, NBC. 49 New York Times “Fanny Brice Dies at the Age of 59,” May 30, 1951. 50 Sara Dunne claims ’s Edith Ann, Whoopi Goldberg’s nameless six-year-old, and Gilda Radner’s Brownie Scout as the true inheritors of Snooks’s legacy. Sara Dunne, “Women as Children in American Comedy: Baby Snooks’ Daughters,” Journal of American History 16 (Summer 1993): 31-35.

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